The Wisest Words:

The wisest words I have heard concerning the "apprehension of truth" came from the pen of Great Schema Archimandrite Damian – then Abbot of the monastery of the Glorious Ascension in Resaca, Georgia – later Abbot of St. Silouan the Athonite Russian Orthodox Monastery, Ben Lomond, CA. In these words he addresses:

(1) The difficulty of finding and following the TRUTH.

(2) Teaches why the "branch theory" of radical Ecumenism cannot work.

(3) But he also teaches that true ecclesiology cannot be based on the legalism of jurisdictionism nor canonism.

(4) And thus the presence of the Church (and the location of God's Grace present within Her) is not so cut and dried, as many "simple minded" Orthodox legalists or Roman Canon Lawyers seem to wish and teach:


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Here at Resaca we have been praying in our simplicity that the Lord would show us His Truth, and He has graciously responded to our helplessness. We have not deserved this great mercy that He has shown us. He has led us to see that any separate part of the Church may be wrong - and must be wrong when it sets itself up against all the rest of God's Holy Church. Also, that any individual person in the Church may be right, even though all the rest, patriarchs and bishops, emperors and kings, may be against him, if only he has the Spirit of Christ. Saint Maximos the Confessor testifies to that. Jesus is Lord, and the Church is One in His Holy Spirit. We cannot lay it out and anatomize it on a table. We can only follow obediently where the Lord Jesus and His Holy Spirit lead us.

The great heresy of our age seems clearly to be Ecumenism. It would no doubt be nice and convenient if Ecumenism were only true, just that thing that Pope and Patriarch and prudent statesmen of every sort have been looking for these many years, and many now think they have found. But how could that be true and Christianity not be wrong? If Ecumenism is right, then it alone is the one great overarching Truth that stands above everything, not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Jesus, but something higher than any of these individual teachers. Such is not the doctrine of Jesus Christ, Who taught that He Himself is Truth, that He is the Way. He never said that He had found the Truth; he said that He is Truth and that He and the Father are One. Ecumenism is necessarily a Unitarian religion THIS is true, even when Ecumenism begins as ostensibly Christian.

If a Christian cannot be Ecumenical, what then can a person do? Obviously, we must follow Christ. But where does Christ lead us, except to Himself? Nowhere, of course; but we must remember that while He is doing this, He also leads His flock through this life, in which He has an individual vocation for each one of us. The Lord has not revealed to us exactly when the world will end, or what He means for each one of us to be doing until then. The only way we can discover that is by following His gracious leading. We know that we are not all to go by the same worldly way because He has told us that, and Saint Paul repeats that doctrine with more variations in so far as it applies to Church functions. For the rest, Saint Paul just says that if a man will not work, let him not eat. (II Thessalonias 3:10)

A great deal of our task in the world is shown to us in "On-the-Job training”, so to speak, while we are working and eating. We start by doing what we can do, what we are told to do, what we have to do, and what we have been doing. We learn what we ought to do by doing these things prayerfully, through which we may sometimes see what we could be doing instead - or the Lord may simply want us to keep on doing exactly what we are doing, whether we like it or not. If everyone on earth tried to live a richly gratifying and exciting life, the world might not long endure. And the patient endurance of dullness, on the other hand, may be a very useful virtue to learn.

In addition to patience, we must lean not to judge. People are seldom as good at that as they think, and not always anxious to learn better. But the Lord may have something worldly He wants us to do, and we should always be ready to learn that or to tolerate it in others. These things cannot be explained; we must just take them as He sends them. Life is not meaningless just because we do not understand it. And our Orthodox Faith is not confused just because our reason cannot hold it together for us.

And so we try to go along in patience at our monastery, working and praying for teaching from the Lord. Some of us may also be drawn to try to understand what we can of the confusion of the present age, and how it got that way; in that way we may be able to throw some light on the confusion of the searching people who come here as visitors, which they may desperately need. This is our vocation: working and praying and giving hospitality to those who write, telephone, or come here as visitors and pilgrims. By praying the Father that He keep us from the world, that we might have eternal life, by knowing the Father and knowing that He sent Jesus into the world, we do what we can to show forth Christ in our lives that we may share with others what we all hold in common - The Truth, Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God. We ask your prayers for us, and know that we hold in our prayers before God all those whose names are sent to us.




Faithfully in Christ,

The Archimandrite Damian & Those Who are with him.

(Abbot of the Holy Cenobitic Monastery of the Glorious Ascension)

Transcribed by Archpriest Symeon Elias.